John K Robertson PhD. Jamestown Lecture: Revolutionary War Defenses in Rhode Island

The Battle of Rhode Island Association (BoRIA) has joined together with the Bristol Historic & Preservation Society (BH&PS), the Jamestown Historical Society, and the Rhode Island Historical Society for three lectures by John Robertson. On Wednesday, May 3rd at 2:00 pm, Dr. Robertson will be speaking in Jamestown for the Jamestown Historical Society at St. Matthews’s Parish Hall, 87 Narragansett Ave. The lecture is based on his new book “Revolutionary War Defenses in Rhode Island.” The book was a 10-year research effort and contains almost 300 maps and plans showing defensive fortifications along most of the coast of Narragansett Bay and southern Rhode Island. Many of the maps are of fortifications on Aquidneck Island, which was occupied during the Revolutionary War at various times by the Americans, British, and French.

John K. Robertson, Ph.D., is a Colonel (Ret.), U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with 23 years of service and served on the faculty at West Point. He is co-owner/editor of the RevWar75.com website. He is a Fellow and Chair for the Endowment Fund Committee of the Company of Military Historians. His research interests include military justice, the militia in the American War for Independence, and Rhode Island in the war.

The Jamestown Historical Society was founded in 1912 to preserve the Jamestown windmill. Since then, they’ve added other preservation efforts – the 1786 Conanicut Friends Meetinghouse, 1776 Conanicut Battery, 1875 primary school that serves as their museum, and a constantly growing collection of more than 40,000 photographs, archives, and artifacts that tell the history of Conanicut (Jamestown), Dutch, and Gould Islands.